it is said that in 2007 Morgan Stanley bank went to the US regulator and said "give us some rules". What they actually meant was " If you define what boxes, then we can tick them and get up to all sorts of underhand activity”. The rest, as they say, is history. Some people have got very rich, and many others have paid the price. We know how much we paid to bail the banks out using taxpayers money, but how much did it cost us in higher fees (UK banks typically charge around 3x the fees that banks in Europe and USA charge), or losses on investments?

As well as bankers, there is another group who are regularly incentivised with cash benefits. Salespeople the world over are given money for selling more.

Does it work?

I remember some particularly complicated pricing – only I was overruled by a sales director who sold it for 20% less. I pointed out that we would make a loss at this price, and was horrified to hear from his own lips "I don't care, I will have taken my bonus and moved on before they ever find out". If he said this so explicitly, I wonder how often it went on, hidden by politeness?

The public sector

In the public sector, executives and senior management are also offered bonuses, in the form of cash. What are the results?

The executives have gone back to their non-executives and remuneration committees, and to the Whitehall departments, and demanded a set of tick-boxes to tick to maximise their bonus. It’s Morgan Stanley all over again. They know that they can comply with these tickboxes, at the same time making themselves ludicrously rich from the public purse.

Payment by Results (PbR) was piloted in South Yorkshire for 12 months before it was rolled out to the rest of England. I had the fortune/misfortune to evaluate it. PbR is a system, and so easy to exploit, no matter how sophisticated it has become since. It is still possible to increase the income and profits but one organisation, at the expense of another, or to withhold payment for various "legitimate" reasons to benefit the second organisation at the expense of the first. We should expect our outstanding leaders to do the right thing; but we don’t, we wearily accept that they will play by the letter of the law not the spirit of the law.

Doing the right thing

The right thing is the action or attitude that leaves customers, or users, or the general population, better off. It's the one that makes a fair return, not an excessive one. It's the action that binds people together as a community, instead of spreading division and hatred.

We need regulators and politicians who can resist the temptation to regulate more and more, but rather set broad criteria principles which are common sense to us the population. They need the power to act, to remove someone or even institute criminal proceedings for actions that are morally wrong, even if no law has technically been broken. They need to be above reproach themselves. We need incentives based on doing the right thing, incentives such as more responsibility, honour*, more freedoms (1).

My specialist area is evaluation. Of course it is best to design an evaluation from the start, but it is certainly possible to evaluate with hindsight. The disciplines of SROI come to the fore here, as they provide a rigorous framework for evaluating when the results cannot be measured in pure financial terms. In the commercial world it’s often called Corporate Social Responsibility, in the public sector it ought to be “business as usual” – but unfortunately is often Business as Unusual. Our evaluations can demonstrate transparency, weed out bad practice, and allow people to be proud of what they do.

And if you can be proud of what you do, then you can achieve great things.

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So you want the opportunities to find you. You want to promote your business without putting any effort in - or at least you want some business coming to you instead of chasing it all the time. You may be fed up witll filling in Pre-Qualification Questionnaires (PQQ) and never getting selected, or a scatter gun approach to responding to tenders.

Keywords:

Bringing jobs to the North East, to the English Regions, to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, is going to take a bit of imagination. Our focus needs to be on infrastructure, on creating links with the rest of the world and on demonstrating that the United Kingdom is, in fact, United.

This can be done with Infrastructure - high speed rail links linking not the cities, but the airports. So a commercial traveler passing through can stop in two airports (one for arrival, another for departure) and talk to two lots of suppliers or importers, and the jobs will follow those conversations.

The public sector in UK will spend £730.4 billion[1] over 12 months 2013/14. A bit of digging suggests that around 37% goes to the independent sector[2]. That’s £270,248million (£270billion) paid to independent companies – commercial organisations and voluntary/ community sector and charities – to provide goods, works and services.

We're delighted to make the Social Return on Investment (SROI) report on Phoenix Futures' National Specialist Family Service available.

The National Specialist Family Service supports parents to overcome their substance misuse addictions, and keep their children. Drug abusers learn to recognise the triggers for their urges and control them. They learn to be good parents and to manage the routines of family life.

For a Social Return on Investment (SROI) analysis, the auditor has to do primary research. This means that it’s the beneficiary (or victim), the Social Workers themselves, who confirm how much benefit or return on investment that they get. It isn’t someone else “answering” on their behalf.

Social Return on Investment, or SROI, asks beneficiaries to put a value on the benefits to themselves. In traditional Cost Benefit Analysis, the project manager decides on the value and who it accrues to, and this has led to a certain amount of optimism bias in business cases and a general avoidance of independent evaluation. So SROI figures are not only more conservative/ cautious, but also endorsed by the beneficiary who will ultimately have to demonstrate that they have gained that value. It all starts with identifying the main beneficiaries.

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